Allison Daminger
Assistant Professor of Sociology
8107 Sewell Social Science
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Biography
My research examines gender inequality in family life, with a particular focus on the cognitive dimension of household labor—the anticipating, researching, deciding, and monitoring involved in running a home and raising children. I am interested in how this inequality persists even among couples who explicitly value egalitarianism, attending both to the broader cultural and institutional forces that shape couples’ options and to the proximate, everyday processes—sensemaking, emotion, decision-making, humor—through which unequal arrangements come to feel natural and fair. I work primarily with in-depth and longitudinal interviews, though I also use surveys and survey experiments to test insights from my qualitative data. Recent and ongoing projects examine gratitude and resentment as windows onto shifting gender norms, the devaluation of housework when women perform it, changing attitudes toward heterosexual relationships, and how contemporary parents navigate their children’s gender socialization amid political polarization.
CDE Research Area Affiliations
Family Demography
Selected Publications
Daminger, Allison. 2025. What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Daminger, Allison, Amanda Nerenberg, Rachel Drapper, Alexandra Feldberg, and Kathleen McGinn. 2026. “Division of Labor, Multiplication of Gratitude? Gratitude and Resentment Within Households.” Journal of Marriage & Family 88(2):442-456.